12th of Never

cans and a dinged-up mailbox.
    He said to Yuki, “That’s it.” Then he took the mike and told the cars behind him to slow and prepare to turn.
    Yuki leaned forward and gripped the armrest. She had never been as humiliated as when her case against Keith Herman had blown up in her face. Far worse, the charges against him had been dropped, and now Keith Herman, presumed innocent, was as free as thought.
    Yuki didn’t know what Keith Herman had to do with hiding his daughter, but she had an idea. Maybe Lily had witnessed or heard something that would prove her father had killed his wife. With luck, the Kohls would fill in the blanks.
    Brady turned up the overgrown driveway and drove uphill to a clearing, where an old wood-shingled house clung to the side of the hill.
    He said to Yuki, “Stay here.”
    She said, “Oh, yeah, right.”
    “I mean it, Yuki. I don’t know what we’re going to find.”
    She got out of the car.
    “Watch me. Stay with me,” Brady said.
    Yuki said, “Okay,” and trudged behind Brady and four cops up the weedy lawn and broken walkway to the front door.
    Brady knocked and announced, repeated both actions, and then footfalls could be heard coming toward them. The door creaked open and a good-looking man of fifty said, “What do you want?”
    “Alan Kohl, we have a warrant to search your premises. Is anyone else at home?” Brady asked.
    “My wife, Marcia. She’s in the kitchen. What’s this about?”
    “It’s about Lily Herman,” Brady said.
    “Lily who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
    Yuki handed the warrant to Kohl. Then she and the cops entered the house.
    “Don’t touch anything. Don’t mess the place up,” Alan Kohl said. “You need something, just ask me.”
    The old two-bedroom house smelled of mold and was almost pathologically neat. Boxes and cartons were stacked against the walls, counters were clean, and closets were filled with folded linens and properly hung clothing. Yuki stayed with Brady until he went upstairs, but then, following a hunch, she went down a flight of wooden steps to a half basement that ran under the back of the house.

Chapter 86
    THE DARK HALF BASEMENT had a low ceiling, a dirt floor, three walls lined with shelves, and a two-door metal utility cabinet backed up against the fourth wall.
    Yuki opened the cabinet doors expecting to see neat shelves of tools, but the cabinet was empty. The back of the cabinet had been replaced with a rectangle of painted plywood fitted with a hook on one side and hinges on the other. Yuki unhooked the plywood board and swung it open.
    There was nothing behind the board—truly nothing but air. Yuki reached into her jacket pocket and took out her keys. She had a flashlight on her key chain, a small one with a pretty bright LED beam. She flashed the light into the back of the closet and saw a tunnel, seemingly endless, that was cut into the hill.
    Yuki took out her phone and called Brady.
    “Come to the basement,” she said. “I think I found something.”
    The opening was four feet high by three feet wide by too deep for the flashlight to find the end of it. Yuki stooped, pulled her elbows in tight to her sides, and stepped into the rabbit hole.
    She followed her flashlight’s beam, and after about twelve feet the tunnel took a soft turn to the left and joined a concrete conduit—it looked like a drainage pipe. Yuki aimed her light and saw that down at the end of the conduit was a metal door.
    Her phone rang. Jackson.
    “I’m in the basement. Where are you?” he said, sounding both annoyed and worried.
    “There’s a tunnel, Jackson. Open the utility cabinet.”
    Yuki knew she should wait for him, but she had to keep going. The door at the end of the conduit had a latch with an open padlock dangling from it. She lifted the padlock, put it on the floor, and opened the metal portal.
    There was an immediate rush of air from a vent overhead. Yuki put her hand on the wall and flipped a switch. Light flooded the tiny room from an overhead fixture, illuminating every square inch of it.
    The cell was six feet by six feet, five feet high, with cement walls. There was a rough wool blanket and a thin uncovered pillow on a narrow cot up against the wall. Yuki saw a bucket in one corner with a toilet seat on it, a small flat-screen TV on a wooden crate, and a hook on the wall with a rag of a nightgown hanging from it. Her eyes went to a child’s crayon drawing of a kitten on the opposite wall, which